Our brother/sister (I'm not sure which is appropriate these
days) organization NACE, the National Association of Corrosion
Engineers, has over the last few years developed a number of
computerized databases simplifying our access to corrosion data. At a
recent monthly meeting of the Toronto Section, Clive Tipple brought in
some programs for demonstration. Tipple, who is a member of the
executive, has undertaken to sell the software in Canada to simplify the
process of importing it from the head office in Houston, TX. He is also
very brave as he performed the demonstrations at a dinner meeting with a
strange computer. The projection facility made a reasonable image for
all to see, but tended to drop some colours, eg. how do you show the
movement of the cursor when it becomes invisible?

The first program we viewed was Cor-Sur. This program looks at some
25 metals and alloys and their corrosion performance in about 1,000
environments. The program is totally menu-driven and can look from
either direction, eg. how do carbon steel or 316 stainless perform in a
sulfuric acid environment as a function of temperature? ...or what
metals would be suitable selections for containing a sulfuric acid
environment? It is a credit to the program that it performed flawlessly
under these conditions; there was no difficulty encountered with people
calling up choices and searches being made. Each search took only a few
seconds, ie. less time than it would take to find the index page of the
first handbook to start a manual search... and this includes the
contents of many handbooks to cover its wide range of operation. Options
included choosing US or metric units and some tuning of the program to
match your system.

I borrowed the program after the meeting to look at it in more
detail. I was particularly interested in how to get a hard copy. The
authors provided a copy of GRAPHICS.COM which allows dumping a CGA
screen to a 9-pin printer. With other graphics cards and printers, you
would then require a commercial graphics screen dump program. I found an
even simpler approach, but as is all too common, not readily obvious
from the manual. You have to tell Cor-Sur that you don't have a
graphics card. It then produces the graphs using the upper ASCII (or
IBM) character set. If your printer can handle these, you just push the
PrtSc button and a neat little graph appears. If you have a screen dump
program such as Snipper (available as freeware on all BBS systems and
local libraries that support free/shareware computer programs), you
could save the screen and incorporate it directly into a wordprocessor
text file...and unlike graphics files, it takes little memory and prints
quickly, but beware: do not print with proportionally-spaced fonts.

At first, it was annoying to find that Cor-Sur had a lot of holes
in the data for several systems. This is not a reflection on the
program, but more a reflection on the completeness of the literature.
It's better to find this after a few minutes on screen rather than
spend a day searching the literature... and this program contains data
from an extensive literature database. There are also numerous
|empty' regions where the corrosion rate was high at low
temperatures and there was no data for higher temperatures. The carbon
steel printout shown is a good example. Although there is no data for
corrosion rates in sulfuric acid at elevated temperatures; we all know
it dissolves.

A companion program Cor-Sur 2 extends the capability to some 35 non
metals (ceramics, polymers, etc.) in 850 corrosive environments. The two
work load together in the same subdirectory and use a common menu
system. Two more-specialized programs Chem-Cor 1 and Petro-Cor 1 cover
selection of materials for sulfuric acid/oleum systems and sucker rod
pumps respectively.

NACE have developed extensive databases with the abstracts cited in
Corrosion Abstracts and from their annual conferences. Cor-Ab started in
1980 and contains about 4,000 abstracts for each year and can be
purchased on floppy disk with annual updates, but as this requires about
4 megs per year, their are advantages to considering a CD-ROM version.
Mic-Ab is somewhat simpler and contains a reference database of some 280
abstracts on microbiologically induced corrosion.

We chose to look at a demo disk of Ab-Search which contains the
abstracts from the annual conferences. As Murphy's Law would have
it, the demo program did not want to work with a strange computer in
front of an audience. (Tipple told me later that it worked perfectly
well then he looked at it the next day with his system.) The committee
is made up of University of Calgary scholars of different disciplines.
If the committee agrees that the manuscript meets recognized scholarly
criteria including a rigorous examination of fundamental propositions
and is appropriate to UCP's publishing programme, it will be sent
for peer review. At least two peer reviews are required.

As with most Canadian university presses. UCP must seek individual
publication funds. One major source of funding for manuscripts in the
humanities and the social sciences is through the Aid to Publications
Programme (ASPP) which acts on behalf of the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities (CFH) and the Social Science Federation of Canada (SSFC). The
Programme is designed to assist the publication of works of advanced
scholarship which make an important contribution to the advancement of
knowledge, but which are unlikely to be self-supporting. We have in the
past had difficulty locating appropriate sources of funds for the
publication of scientific works therefore I was delighted to read about
the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada's
Scientific Publications Grants Programme.

Perhaps in a future issue you may wish to publish the names of
Canadian publishers interested in considering manuscripts for
publication. Please keep the University of Calgary Press in mind.